Classical Liberal Education: Scarce, Embattled, Essential

Excellence in most any interesting or worthy human undertaking requires years of discipline and training. To perform at the highest levels of sports, the arts, law, medicine, commerce, teaching, scholarship, writing, military service, statesmanship, and virtually every useful, honorable, or intrinsically rewarding pursuit typically depends on extensive discipline and training.

It would be odd, therefore, if excellence as a citizen and human being called for anything less. Indeed, down through the ages a liberal education, an education to foster flourishing as a free person, was understood as essential to the achievement of civic and human excellence.

Yet rights-protecting democracies also dispose citizens to see threats to freedom and equality lurking behind every claim to promote excellence, including the excellence involved in respecting the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and in exercising the qualities of mind and character central to living a good life. Many progressive educators, who dominate in our schools and universities, reason that imposing structure, establishing priorities, and supposing that teachers know better than students what should be taught and learned impairs students’ freedom and undercuts democratic equality.

Other progressive educators adopt a more radical approach. They implicitly acknowledge that American education requires structure, should establish priorities, and properly supposes that teachers know best. But they aim to instill disgust with America. They organize education around the claim that the evil institution of slavery and the abhorrent practice of racial discrimination reflect the fundamental substratum of American politics. They concentrate on spotlighting America’s flaws and mistakes while sweeping under the rug America’s extraordinary accomplishments. And, insisting that their account of the facts is beyond dispute, they stifle dissent, exclude countervailing evidence, vilify opposing views, constrict students’ moral imagination, and truncate intellectual exploration.